A world without advertising is - by and large - a world of entrenched megacompanies that dominate their space without fear of usurp. It's a world where the only viable politicians are popular actors.
Like it or not, advertising is an important way of spreading new memes in a liberal society based on voluntary exchange. Banning advertising is a recipe for stagnation.
that's nonsense. memes do not rely on advertising to exist, and as advertising is a service (that costs money) it's the biggest wallets that benefit the most from it.
hell, look at Facebook and Google, both advertising companies and I'd argue two of the biggest and most entrenched.
Organic meme spread is extremely random and unpredictable. Yes, rich people (and conglomerations of not-so-rich people) have better access to advertising. So what?
Facebook and Google are just mediums, like "television" in the abstract. The social value of advertising comes from the people doing the advertising. Like everything, some of it's crap and some of it's great.
It would be strictly worse. Advertising is at worst an annoyance. On the other hand, a legally-enforced gatekeeping bureaucracy that decides whose speech is allowed to reach other people is an Orwellean nightmare. Do you trust <insert your opposing political tribe here> to decide which political ads are acceptable?
Despite HN's fixation on G and F, there are multitudes of advertising channels both online and offline.
My main concern's dragnet spying and user-targeted (not content-targeted) ads but I do think it'd be nice to get rid of (nearly) all ads, too—it's just that if I can only pick eliminate all ads or eliminate all spying, I'd pick the latter. I think that priority order is why people tend to fixate on big tech, for which the spying is all tied up with the advertising, but I also think magazines selling subscriber lists should be illegal, the CRAs should either be eliminated or much more tightly regulated, credit card companies shouldn't be able to sell your purchase data, et c. No companies should be able to do those things, it's just that Big Tech does a lot of that (but so do financial institutions and so on, sure, and those shouldn't be able to do it either).
Separately, yes, it would be nice to at squeeze all advertising down to some very small factor in the economy, if not completely eliminate it (which is probably impractical).
[EDIT] But back to the original point, your scary-no-advertising-world post mostly just describes the current state of our has-advertising world.
Like it or not, advertising is an important way of spreading new memes in a liberal society based on voluntary exchange. Banning advertising is a recipe for stagnation.